James Burke - Cimarron Rose

'Lucas, we need to clear something up here. There's only one person in this room running your defense,' Temple said.

But I motioned at her with two fingers. She looked at me with a puzzled expression, then chewed on the corner of her lip and stared silently out the window.

That evening I took off my shirt and hung it on a fence rail and raked out the chicken run and horse lot and dumped a load of manure and decayed straw in the compost pile, then filled a bucket with water from the windmill pipe and began digging a line of postholes so I could reset the rail fence and enlarge the lot for Beau. It was a lovely evening. The sun had dipped below the hills, its last rays breaking into pink wagon spokes against the sky. The wind was blowing in the trees and I could smell wildflowers in the fields and bream spawning under the lily pads out in the tank. I almost didn't hear Brian Wilcox's car crunching up my drive.

He got out of the car and walked through both sets of barn doors into the lot. Behind him, I could see the Mexican drug agent, Felix Ringo, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, the window down to catch the breeze, his tropical hat on the back of his head.

Wilcox's mouth was painted with an ironic smile.

'You hang a revolver on a fence post while you work?' he said.

'Some guys blindsided me out here one night. I hate repeat situations,' I said.

'You know what quid pro quo is, right, one thing for another?… I'm doing you a big one, Holland, but I want something in return.'

'Go fuck yourself.'

'That's kind of what I expected from you, but here it is, anyway. Mary Beth is coming back to give you the testimony you need, but you'd better not drag your shit into our investigation again.'

'Meaning?'

'Our sun-darkened friend out there in the car is a valuable man. He doesn't get compromised.'

I pulled the handles of the posthole digger out of the hole and knocked the dirt free from the blades, then tipped more water from the bucket into the hole.

'Nothing to say?' Wilcox asked.

'Yeah, that guy was at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Their graduates have a funny way of showing up in death squads and torture chambers.'

'So maybe I don't like putting my fingers in bean dip. But the object is to make the case, right? All you've got to worry about is leaving us out of your trial.'

Behind him, I saw Felix Ringo get out of the car and walk toward us.

'When's Mary Beth coming?' I asked.

'I thought I'd get your attention this time… Tonight, probably.'

'I don't think you arranged this at all. I think she's coming on her own.'

He pinched a breath mint out of roll and slipped it in his mouth.

'You're quite a guy,' he said.

Temple Carrol's car came up the drive and pulled around Wilcox's, disappeared beyond the side of the barn, then stopped by the windmill.

Felix Ringo walked up to Wilcox, ignoring me. He smoked a cigarette in a gold holder without removing it from his lips. 'You finished talking here? I got to shower and meet a lady for dinner,' he said.

I heard Beau's hooves thudding behind me. I turned and saw him spooking back against the fence rails, walleyed, his head tossing.

I stared at Felix Ringo. 'He knows you,' I said.

Ringo curved his fingertips into his sternum.

'Your horse knows me?' he said, his mustache winking.

'Beau never forgets children or a bad person. You've been here before, haven't you?' I said.

'I been here before? The horse knows I'm a bad guy or something, 'cause he's got this kind of computer memory?' Ringo's fingers gestured impotently in the air.

'You were one of the guys who attacked me. I thought the guy had a gold tooth. But it was your gold cigarette holder I saw.'

Ringo removed his tropical hat, with the green plastic window in the brim, and wiped out the inside with a handkerchief.

'I'll be in the car,' he said to Wilcox. 'This guy here, he's got a disease in his thinking, like clap or something. I don't want to be hearing it no more.'

He walked back through the open barn doors, the wind billowing his loosely buttoned shirt. The butt of a black automatic was pushed down in the back of his trousers.

'You got the wrong man. Felix works for us,' Wilcox said.

'That's the problem,' I said.

I thudded the blades of the posthole digger into the hole and expanded the handles and turned them in a circle, the grain of the wood twisting against my calluses. I could feel the sweat in my eyebrows, my heart beating in my chest.

Brian Wilcox continued to stare at me, his mouth still painted with that ironic smile.

'So maybe this is the last time I see you,' Wilcox said.

He's going to do it, I thought.

I lifted the posthole digger free and rinsed the blades in the bucket of water. The wind popped in my ears, as though it were filled with distant pistol reports. I opened and closed my mouth and pressed with one thumb under my right ear.

'You all right?' he asked, and cupped his hand on my bare shoulder. I could feel the heat and oil in his skin, as though he were rubbing a layer of fouled air into my pores.

Don't let it happen, I told myself.

'Sorry we tossed your house,' he said.

'Forget it.'

'About Mary Beth…'

'Yes?'

'She'll come for you a second time, but you have to stay on top. There's something about the missionary position with her. She just can't get over the crest when she's sitting on you.'

I caught him right below the bottom lip, saw his teeth bare and his mouth go out of shape with the blow; then I drove my fist into his eye socket, hooked him with my left in the nose and hit him again in the mouth. His knees buckled and his head bounced off a fence rail. I felt him try to grab my waist as he went down, his eyes wide with fear, like those of a man who realizes he has slipped forever off a precipice, and I knew the old enemy had once more had its way and something terrible was happening in me that I couldn't stop.

He was at my feet now, his face strung with blood, his tie twisted backward on his neck, his chest laboring for breath.

Then among the thud of Beau's hooves, I saw Felix Ringo running at me through the tunnel of light inside the barn, simultaneously pulling back the slide on his nine-millimeter, his hat blowing off his head.

'You wasn't born, gringo. You was picked out of your mother's shit. This is for them people you killed down in Coahuila,' he said.

My hands felt swollen and useless at my sides, my chest running with sweat in the wind, the spilled water bucket ballooning in the dust by my feet. I could hear the blades on the windmill clattering like a playing card clipped inside whirling bicycle spokes. Felix Ringo extended the nine-millimeter in front of him with both hands, crouched in a shooter's position, as though he were on a practice range, and flipped off the butterfly safety with his thumb.

Temple Carrol stooped under the top fence rail, ripped L.Q. Navarro's revolver from the holster I had hung on a fence post, and screwed the barrel right behind Ringo's ear. She cocked the hammer, locking the cylinder in place.

'How your pud hanging, greaseball? You want to wear your brain pan on your shirt?' she asked. chapter twenty-nine

There was no false dawn the next morning. The sky was a black lid above the velvet green crest of the hills, the clouds veined with lightning. I opened all the windows and let the smell of ozone and wind and distant rain fill the house. Mary Beth called while I was fixing breakfast.

'Where are you?' I asked.

'At the hotel downtown.'

'When did you get in?'

'Late. I went right to bed.'

'I could have picked you up.'

'You mean if I'd called?'

'No, I meant-'

'My schedule's not too predictable these days.'